Dressed casually in jeans and a pale blue shirt, Pichai addressed several subjects -from his time at IIT to the kind of work that affects billions at Google nowET Bureau | January 06, 2017, 08:17 IST

Visiting his alma mater IIT-Kharagpur 23 years after he graduated, Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday addressed a crowd of over 3,500 people at the campus, talking about a wide range of subjects.

"When I came to college, I was looking to have a good time," said Pichai, in a fireside chat with Hitesh Oberoi, CEO of InfoEdge, the company that has majority stake in websites such as Naukri, 99acres and Jeevansathi.

Dressed casually in jeans and a pale blue shirt, Pichai addressed several subjects -from his time at IIT to the kind of work that affects billions at Google now. The Google CEO looked comfortable in his engineering campus and fielded questions from the audience as well as from Oberoi.

Asked about why the "next Google" has not yet come from India, and what Indian startups should look at, Pichai said it would take a few more years to fully realise the potential of the market developing in India.

"Hopefully Indian companies are more thoughtful about this and are targeting Indonesia and Vietnam and Thailand. I think those markets are developed and the same products would work well in those markets. They should set their sights higher," he added.

Asked about the what drives innovation at Google, Pichai, in his unhurried style said the criteria is to "aim high" and find a solution that would apply to billions of people and solves a real problem for them.

"Larry (Page) says if you work on really difficult things you're better off, you have no competition, others aren't working on those difficult problems. Even if you fail, you end up doing something great in the process. That's the philosophy that has guided us all these years," he said.

He reiterated Google's commitment to machine learning and artificial intelligence, which has been the company's focus for some time now.

While this deep learning has helped Google crack translations on its Translate product effectively , Pichai recounted his initial troubles with Hindi at Kharagpur.

"I learned Hindi in school but never spoke it much so I thought you spoke to everyone like that. I had to once call someone and I called him "abey saale".

"In my first couple of weeks, I thought you call people that way," he told Oberoi.